Going into the oral argument, the tribes may well have at least a small advantage in that their argument amounts to three simple propositions: what is at stake is a matter of simple fairness in living up to one’s promises, the government’s ineptness in managing its money deserves no sympathy, and both antique and recent precedent clearly control the outcome. That may stack up well against the government’s rather complex effort to draw a clear distinction between the Cherokee Nation precedent and this new case, its fairly dismissive treatment of the Judgment Fund as a source of funds for the tribes’ claims, and its studied effort to treat the old 1892 precedent in the Ferris case as a matter deserving of little notice and not much argument.

The Court is often seen as quite sympathetic to the plight of Indian tribes, and that can add an emotional factor to any case involving tribal rights. But here, the tribes’ usual, quite zealous protectors — the Interior Department and its Bureau of Indian Affairs — are on the other side, and they are making an argument that their overall obligations to care for the tribes’ interests should not be sacrificed to a legal duty to pay for administrative costs, especially in the face of Congress’s continuing skepticism about those costs.

If the Court is drawn mainly to the constitutional issue that the government has sought to make so prominent, that could work to the government’s considerable advantage. Congress since 1994 has left no doubt that it intended to curb what the Interior Department could spend on a very specific item, and that is difficult to argue around. If the Court is sensitive to separation of powers concerns in this case, and it presumably is always sensitive to that core constitutional concept, it may not want to be seen as second-guessing the lawmakers’ primacy in overseeing the federal Treasury. In this respect, the tribes’ effort to play down the significance of the language used to impose spending caps appeared to be a bit strained.

The tribes’ reliance on the Cherokee Nation precedent has some surface appeal, but, on closer examination, it does not seem to be as clear cut as the tribes would prefer. The lower courts have not been of one mind on its impact, and that no doubt will be noticed by the Justices.

“The [United States Supreme] Court is often seen as quite sympathetic to the plight of Indian tribes” . . . What? In what alternate universe does Lyle Dennison live? Criminal defendants win more cases before the Supremes than Indian tribes.